A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  That what he had heard in the overtures and codas of their silences, the arpeggios, the crescendos, and the occasional discordance, had all been in his own head. That their two kisses had been mere experiments to her, and her proposal to become his mistress had resulted from mere pragmatism and conveyed more of a desire not to be indebted to him than a desire for him.

  That she truly possessed a mechanical heart, no more capable of engaging in higher emotions than an abacus could produce poetry.

  Which made it all the more difficult to decide whether there was a new component to the silence today, an uneasiness apart from the usual tension. Was it at all possible, this nuance upon a nuance, or was it as far-fetched as finding an additional code in the solution to a Vigenère cipher?

  He was glad when they got off the train and into a hackney. Not the entirety of the forty-minute journey had been mired in charged silence. Some of it had been productive silence: They had performed calculations to arrive at a rough estimate of the distance represented by one second of longitude at their current latitude.

  A very rough estimate, given that to simplify the calculations, they supposed the earth to be perfectly round, rather than the oblate shape that it actually was. But they let that assumption stand. All they needed was an idea of how far from the point on the map they ought to search—to allow for errors on the part of everyone involved: the surveyors, the mapmakers, the cipher writers, and they themselves.

  They started on a street that overlaid the spot specified by the decoded denary numbers. It possessed no features to suggest that anyone would take the trouble to create an elaborate cipher to hide its location. In fact, the entirety of Hounslow, its heath aside, could be used to illustrate the word unexceptional.

  Not to mention they had no idea how old the cipher was. If Bancroft had taken something out of the vault from a generation ago, this part of town could have looked very different. If memory served, Hounslow had fallen into a decline after being passed by the railway. And only when another rail line came through did the community experience a revival.

  Holmes snorted softly, sounding unimpressed with herself.

  He looked at his pocket map, on which he had demarcated the search area, and told the cabbie, “Take us to all the surrounding streets. We want to see the whole area.”

  They discussed how much of the area they wished to see, retreading much the same ground that had been covered when they’d performed the calculations. He was treating her lark of a quest with far too much seriousness—but better that than to lapse into silence again.

  They passed yet another street. Brown brick houses, narrow doors, postage-stamp-size picket-enclosed front gardens that displayed a general lack of horticultural talents.

  As they turned onto the next street, Holmes said, “Someone is coming out of a house in that lane we just passed. Perhaps I can ask a few questions.”

  It seemed unlikely that a random neighbor would be privy to secrets that required several iterations of ciphering—or confirm that no such secrets existed—but Lord Ingram relayed the directions to the cabbie.

  By the time they turned back onto the lane, three men stood outside. The one with his back to the houses was in uniform: a policeman.

  “Interesting,” murmured Holmes. “This I did not anticipate.”

  They alit. All three men turned in their direction. Now here was a development Lord Ingram did not anticipate: He knew two out of the three men, Inspector Treadles and his colleague Sergeant MacDonald, of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police.

  He exchanged a glance with Holmes. She appeared as unmoved as ever, but he could feel his own heartbeat accelerate.

  Lord Ingram and Inspector Treadles had been friends for years—they shared a passion for archaeology. The inspector had known of Holmes for a while but had met her only recently, for the Sackville case. The successful untangling of the case had made Holmes’s name and it had also made the inspector look good both in the papers and to his superiors.

  Therefore, as surprising as this reunion was, Inspector Treadles should be glad to see them.

  A flicker of displeasure crossed the inspector’s face. This jolted Lord Ingram. Almost as shocking was the tightness with which the man held himself, as if preparing for an assault.

  “Inspector, Sergeant, how unexpected,” said Lord Ingram, far more restrained than he would have been otherwise. “Trouble in these parts?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss police matters,” replied his friend, his voice flat.

  A tall, red-faced man emerged from the house. “Ah, Inspector Treadles,” he said loudly. “You are here. The body’s inside and it’s not pretty.”

  Lord Ingram didn’t know why this should stun him—Inspector Treadles primarily investigated murders—but stun him it did.

  He hoped he did not betray too much agitation when he said, “Let me not keep you from your work. Inspector, Sergeant, good day.”

  They drove to the nearest telephone station, which happened to be on the premises of a high street shop. The apparatus itself was located inside an armoirelike structure, with a large pane of glass on the door—a silence cabinet.

  Charlotte was interested. She had never used a telephone—neither her parents nor Mrs. Watson had one. But it would have been the height of impropriety to squeeze into the cabinet with Lord Ingram—not that she hadn’t done worse with Roger Shrewsbury—so she stood outside at some distance and waited.

  He had his back to the glass door, the earpiece pressed close. The silence cabinet wasn’t entirely soundproof. Occasionally she caught a few syllables that didn’t make any apparent sense—he was probably speaking in code.

  When they met, she had not foreseen that he would become a clandestine agent of the crown—forgivable since at the time, she hadn’t been aware such entities existed. But she had soon concluded that his would not be an easy life.

  He had been well-built and athletic even then, a young man with an assertive, lupine stride. His scowls were already legendary—at least among the children who knew him. And the rumors that had circulated about him . . . They would have made him at once the cleverest and the stupidest boy who ever lived, the most impulsively passionate and the most chillingly callous.

  But then she saw him with her own eyes. Noticed the mud that stuck to his boots even after he had scraped them—and the traces of dirt that still clung to the lateral folds of his nails even though he’d scrubbed them until his fingertips were reddish and raw. Whatever he’d been doing, when nobody could find him, he hadn’t been making love to saucy maids.

  She didn’t discount the possibility that he might be burying them—even though none had been reported missing. But then she traced the mud on his boots to the old quarry on the property and the unexpected Roman site he was painstakingly excavating.

  By himself.

  She was well aware of the whispers that he was not his father’s son but the result of his mother’s affair with a Jewish banker. And she was fairly certain that he didn’t know it yet—not officially, in any case. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t sensed the looks or the whispers that stopped when he entered a room, only that he could still pretend it was about something else.

  But perhaps he was nearing the end of his ability to pretend. Perhaps that was why he had secluded himself amid the ruins of an ancient villa, reading the lives of the dead.

  He was sensitive. And he believed himself to have been somehow responsible for the disgrace attached to his birth.

  In this he had not changed in all the subsequent years. Another man would have turned on his wife, believing, with sufficient reason, that his affections had been preyed upon. He had continued to extend every courtesy and generosity to Lady Ingram, even as they grew ever further apart, because of this deep conviction: If there was any blame to go around, then some of it must belong to him.

/>   Was it possible that he would absolve himself of that culpability if he should hear something of what Charlotte had learned of his wife? Could Charlotte, in the end, render him this one favor, for everything he had done for her?

  Lord Ingram emerged from the silence cabinet. “Would you like to take a walk?”

  She blinked. He had never asked whether she wished to go for a walk. “On the heath?”

  Hounslow Heath was probably the town’s only claim to fame, other than that it had once been a major stop on the carriage road.

  “Yes. It’s a good day and we could both do with more exercise,” he said in all seriousness.

  But then the corners of his lips curved.

  “Ha,” she said.

  “Ha, of course. You will have had a walk with Mrs. Watson today, and fifteen minutes on your feet counts as an active day for you.”

  “It must be a sound philosophy, as I am in glorious health.”

  “That is called youth and you will pay for your sedentary habits sooner or later. But since I am a terrible friend in this regard . . . would you like to sit for a while? I understand there’s a place down the street that has won some renown for its Devonshire cream.”

  “God bless terrible friends. Yes to the Devonshire cream, of course.” She waited until they had left the shop before asking, “What will Bancroft do?”

  “Pull a few levers of power. His people, perhaps he himself, will inspect the house. And needless to say, before the end of the day, someone will also have seen to the site in Tilbury.”

  “Why are you herding me to a tea shop, then?”

  “Bancroft has asked if you wouldn’t mind staying nearby for some time. I have a feeling he plans to further woo you by letting you inspect the site.”

  Death was all around them. Modern medicine, for all its advances, had yet to find a way to prevent vast swaths of the population from being felled by everything from influenza to septicemia. Charlotte had viewed the bodies of a number of neighbors and relatives, so she was no stranger to corpses. But this would be a first.

  “He would let me view the murdered man?”

  Bancroft, by proposing to her the second time, had proved himself no ordinary man. But she had no idea that he was this unconventional. Could they suit each other, after all?

  “It is generally agreed upon that Bancroft has no chivalry,” said his brother.

  “What about you?”

  “Haven’t you always told me that chivalry should only be practiced on those in need of assistance and not on those perfectly capable of assisting themselves?”

  “When did you start to listen to me?”

  “I often listen to you, Holmes. I don’t always announce it when I do.”

  Lord Ingram was the most fair-minded man she knew—and it was a fair-mindedness that arose from a sincere desire to put himself in the shoes of another, unlike her general neutrality, which was composed largely of logical distance.

  And sometimes, that logical distance came under assault from irrational sentiments. She had told Mrs. Watson that it would have helped him not at all for Sherlock Holmes to turn down Lady Ingram—and she believed it still, absolutely. But when he was open and honest with her—and it couldn’t be easy for him to be that way . . .

  She felt rotten.

  “Did it bother you to see Inspector Treadles?” she asked.

  He glanced at her askance. “Have you taken up the practice of chivalry? Since when are you concerned as to whether something bothers me?”

  “Do excuse me. I meant to say, I saw that Inspector Treadles’s demeanor gave you pause.”

  “Only because it was largely directed at you. Has he conducted himself in a similar manner before?”

  “I wouldn’t say he’d expressed outright displeasure toward me earlier, but the trend was clear. It was obvious that when he last bid me good-bye, he’d hoped not to see me for a good long while.”

  “Why? He owes much of his recent success to you.”

  She only looked at him.

  He shook his head. “He can’t be this kind of a man, can he? He respects women.”

  “He respects women he deems worthy of respect—I am no longer one in his eyes. He is not pleased that he has helped and been helped by a woman he cannot respect. And he cannot think as highly of you as he had earlier, because my lack of respectability seems to have made no difference to you.”

  “What kind of a friend would I be if I’d cut ties the moment you were no longer acceptable to the rest of Society? And why should he be offended that I didn’t do it?”

  She shrugged. “There are men like my father. It is not enjoyable to number among his female dependents, because he is selfish and because he disdains women in general—or indeed anyone who is any different from him. And then there are men like Inspector Treadles, an excellent person by almost all standards. But he admires the world as it is and he subscribes to the rules that uphold the world as it is. For him then it’s the principle of the thing. Anyone who breaks the rules endangers the order of the world and should be punished. He does not ask whether the rules are fair; he only cares that they are enforced.

  “Someone like me, who has broken the rules blatantly without seeming to have suffered any consequences—I am an affront, a menace to the order that he holds dear. Worse, his opinion is immaterial to me and he cannot do anything about it. It must chafe at him. I only hope his wife fares better, if she ever breaks any rules he deems important.”

  “But he loves her!”

  “I’m sure he does. Let’s remember, however, that he also admired Sherlock Holmes, until he discovered Charlotte Holmes’s transgressions.”

  At Lord Ingram’s pained expression, she added, “I am not saying that he is a completely draconian man who will always put his principles above the people in his life. Only that for him, questioning what he believes—what he believes so deeply he doesn’t even think about—would be more painful than breaking his own kneecaps with a sledgehammer.”

  Lord Ingram looked as if he was about to reply, but something—or someone, rather—caught his attention. “That’s Underwood, Bancroft’s man.”

  Mr. Underwood, large and rotund, moved with surprising agility. He came to a stop at their table and bowed. “Miss Holmes, his lordship awaits you.”

  Mr. Underwood also had a message for Lord Ingram, who glanced at it, frowned, and said to Charlotte, “Do please excuse me, Miss Holmes. I trust I’ll have the pleasure of your company again before too long.”

  “Good day, my lord—and I do hope so.”

  He had given his standard parting line, but hers had been a few words too long—usually she stopped at Good day, my lord. He narrowed his eyes before he bowed and left.

  Charlotte followed Mr. Underwood to a waiting town coach.

  The street where they were deposited was neither cheerful nor oppressive. It was simply part and parcel of a place built for function, rescued from outright tedium by an occasional window box of blooming pansies, or a set of shutters newly painted a sky blue, in defiance of the murky air of the city, which would soon turn it a much grimier shade.

  The house itself was a nonentity. Its tiny plot of land, delineated by a low brick wall, contained two bushes, pruned but not meticulously so. The door opened into a small entry, a space for coats and umbrellas and muddy galoshes—but any mud that had been tracked in earlier had been cleaned away, and the vestibule was empty except for a walking stick that hung on a hook on the wall.

  Mr. Underwood guided her into a sparsely furnished parlor, where Lord Bancroft sat, a tea service on the low table beside him, along with a handsome Victoria sandwich.

  Lord Ingram ate everything set down before him and didn’t care greatly whether the food was exquisite or barely edible. Lord Bancroft, on the other hand, shared with Charlotte a sustained interest in dinners—and breakfasts and
luncheons and teas.

  Moreover, he was the sort of fortunate man who could eat what he pleased without having to worry about exceeding Maximum Tolerable Chins. In fact, Charlotte suspected that the more he ate, the leaner he became.

  “Ah, Miss Holmes,” he said cheerfully. “Have you been enjoying yourself with my brother?”

  Another man might have said it snidely. Lord Bancroft was not that man: He had not asked Charlotte to love him, only to marry him—and therefore her spending time with his brother, a married man, was of no concern.

  He and she were more alike than she had ever realized before.

  “It has been an interesting day,” she answered. “Are you having me followed, by the way, my lord?”

  “My dear Miss Holmes,” said Lord Bancroft without the least hesitation, “you know I can never answer such queries. A bite with your tea?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She’d had a scone with Devonshire cream at the tea shop, but it would be remiss not to try the Victoria sandwich. The kind of pastry a man could come up with on short notice—and with a dead body in the house—said a great deal about him.

  The sponge was fresh and light, the strawberry jam between the layers the perfect combination of sweet and tart. Chased with a cup of beautifully brewed tea, it was absolutely flawless.

  “No one ought to work without being properly fed.”

  Charlotte couldn’t agree more if she tried. “This is certainly being properly fed.”

  Lord Bancroft looked pleased. “I take it you are ready to work then, Miss Holmes?”

  “Lord Ingram gave me the impression that you would like me to see the body,” said Charlotte cautiously.

  She braced herself to hear Lord Bancroft clarify that there were no such plans, but he said, “I understand you can tell a great deal about a person from a look. I assume it might also work for corpses.”

  He really meant for her to see the victim—and no mention of anyone’s delicate feminine sensibilities.

  “I can do that,” she said, scarcely able to keep wonder and eagerness out of her voice. “But it always helps to have greater context. What can you tell me about the victim or the circumstances?”